AT&T’s 4 Open RAN pillars—open basebands, third-party radio integration, cloud RAN, and superior community administration
In a landmark deal that signaled the maturity of Open RAN for main brownfield communications service suppliers (CSPs), AT&T in 2023 introduced it might spend greater than $14 billion over the following 5 years to modernize its radio entry community (RAN) utilizing disaggregated {hardware} from a number of distributors. AT&T’s said aim is to transition 70% of its wi-fi community visitors to open, programmable platforms by late 2026.
In an interview filmed throughout Cellular World Congress 2025, AT&T and Fujitsu executives outlined the strategic significance of the connection and its implications for broader cultivation of the Open RAN ecosystem.
AT&T’s Rob Soni, vp of radio entry expertise, described the 4 “pillars’ supporting its “transformation to open”: shifting from a proprietary to open baseband, bringing in third-party radios to assist “modern and artistic” deployment and densification situations, transition to cloud-based RAN, and superior community administration.
Increasing on utilizing an open baseband to interoperate with third-party radios, Soni stated the transfer “permits the chance for firms like Fujitsu to pair with Ericsson within the community instantly…We’ve aligned on choosing Fujitsu notably as a most popular provider for what we’d name our first of many third-party radios.” He defined that permitting radio distributors to instantly innovate with AT&T, slightly than being gated by a proprietary baseband, creates new alternatives round observability, alarming, and different capabilities that wouldn’t in any other case have been potential.
As Open RAN requirements, interoperability testing, and integration in greenfield and brownfield networks have progressed, deploying performant, steady multi-vendor techniques is turning into easier. Fujitsu Community Communications Vice President and Head of Radio Unit Enterprise and Improvement Patrick Eriksson stated the method is repeatedly enhancing. “Now there’s maturity within the ecosystem with multi-vendor product administration, automation of check suites—it’s mainly letting us spend a lot much less time, and in addition much less effort, than up to now.” Fujitsu’s work with Ericsson for AT&T “is mainly taking it to the following stage,” he stated, as a result of they need to ship on operational and efficiency necessities “which might be least pretty much as good as single RAN.”
The important thing takeaway, Soni stated, is that AT&T, and different CSPs, need options designed to resolve their particular, distinctive issues, which giant incumbents attempting to handle a world market have been reluctant to handle. “There was a robust buyer focus from Fujitsu to drive in the direction of one thing that was very particularly for AT&T to resolve an issue…The attention-grabbing facet impact is that now we’ve began to listen to that as this radio has proliferated, the opposite operators are additionally on the lookout for this radio. So we’re hoping that generates the sort of scale that’s in the end invaluable not only for us, however for Fujitsu.”
In abstract, AT&T’s collaboration with Ericsson, Fujitsu, and different {hardware} and software program distributors to deploy Open RAN applied sciences represents a pivotal shift towards open, versatile, and multi-vendor community infrastructures. This endeavor is poised to reinforce community effectivity, stimulate innovation, and set new benchmarks for the telecommunications business.